


Where the Shadows Lie

by LeastExpected_Archivist



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-02-04
Updated: 2002-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:00:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25972537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeastExpected_Archivist/pseuds/LeastExpected_Archivist
Summary: by Anne EllisDuring one of his visits to Buckland, young Frodo, Merry, and Pippin spend an afternoon swimming in the Brandywine. Sometimes those things people whisper about you are true.
Kudos: 2
Collections: Least Expected





	Where the Shadows Lie

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Amy Fortuna, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Least Expected](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Least_Expected), which has been offline since 2002. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in August 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on the [Least Expected collection profile](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/leastexpected/profile).
> 
> Disclaimer: Everybody belongs to JRR Tolkien. I just gave them an afternoon outing.  
> Feedback: I'd be mighty grateful.  
> Story Notes: Pointless angst-fluff.

They were both looking at him, two small sunburned faces with expressions that were puzzled, almost accusing, beneath their wild mops of curls.

"But you _know_ how to swim," Pippin said. His voice wavered between confusion and exasperation. "You've always known, Frodo. You *can't* have forgotten."

Frodo lay propped up on his elbows on the blanket they'd spread beneath the shade of the willows, a few yards away from the water, his chin in his hands. He smiled at his two young cousins. "Yes, but it's been years and years. They're not much for swimming up in Hobbiton. I believe that if I were to try it now I'd sink like any stone. But you go in, both of you, and I'll watch."

In this calm elbow of the Brandywine, beneath the shelter of overhanging trees, the river was dappled with fallen leaves, its water cool and brown and smelling of earth. The bank was an easy slope with few stones, with swaying stands of cattails and mats of reeds softening its verge. The silvery wood of a little fishing-jetty pushed out from the bank into the deeper water. There the river turned over and over, its water braided and furrowed with the gentle current, glistening under the broiling late-afternoon sun.

Pippin had already stripped off. His ragged and too-long trousers, a hand-me-down from Merry, were bundled in a heap next to Frodo on the grass. Brown and bare and lithe as a little otter, he put his fists on his hips. "Where's the fun in watching other people swim?"

"Give over, Pip. He thinks he's too grown-up now." Merry's fingers worked at the last of his own shirt-buttons. "A gentleman and a scholar is our Mr. Baggins. No doubt he's brought a book." Almost knee-deep, he balanced on one leg and kicked a spray of water in the general direction of the blanket. Silvery drops flared in the sunlit air, scattered across the grass. Frodo put his tongue out at him.

Merry threw his shirt to the bank and then waded deeper, the water rising around his hips and then his shoulders. Abruptly his curly head disappeared, a swirling of leaves in the tobacco-colored water left behind on the surface. After a moment he emerged near the jetty with a splash, hooting. "Cold, it's cold! It's wonderful! Come in, Pip!"

Still Pippin lingered on the shore. His wide brown eyes studied Frodo. "I wish you'd brought Sam," he said finally.

The older hobbit sat up, picked idly at the long grass beside the blanket. "They're harvesting. He has work of his own to do at home, too much to run off to Buckland for a visit." He broke off a blade and put it in his mouth. "Besides, nothing could convince him to go in. Master Samwise hates the water."

Pippin dabbled with one foot, his hands clasped behind his back. Already the baby-roundness of his face had begun to sharpen into the elfin features that were the unmistakable stamp of the Tooks; pointed nose, pointed chin, an angular sweetness to the mouth. Frodo's own mother, granddaughter to the Old Took, had possessed such a face. "But he'd still make you come play with us. He wouldn't let you just sit on the bank like someone's old gammer. Sam makes sure you have fun even when you don't want to."

"Does he?" Frodo stood up, smiling at his young cousin. "I suppose he does. And now I'll have to tell him that you're just as strict with me."

As Frodo pulled his shirttails loose and shrugged his braces from his shoulders, Pippin yelped with delight. He ran up the bank and caught at the older hobbit's hand.

"Come on! Merry taught me to hold my breath and swim under the water, and I can go from the end of the jetty all the way out to the middle of the river without coming up for air. Let me show you! And last week we saw a fish under the bluff by the oak tree, a fish that was almost as long as I am and it had _whiskers_ , Frodo! And yellow eyes like a cat's. Merry says it lives in a hole under there, he says it eats little hobbits but I don't think that's so..."

Laughing, Frodo stepped out of his trousers and kicked them aside. He lifted Pippin into his arms. Against his own body, pale from days in the library of Bag End, his little cousin was as smooth and ruddy as a sun-warmed apple, smelling of fresh air and earth. As they started towards the water Pippin impulsively put his arms around Frodo's neck, his soft curls tickling beneath the older hobbit's chin.

"I'm glad you came to see us again," he said, and kissed Frodo's cheek. "I heard Uncle Dinodas tell Merry's father that you wouldn't visit us any more now that you know you're going to inherit all Bilbo's money, because there's nothing prouder than a jumped-up poor relation." Out in the river, thirty feet from shore, Merry turned and began to swim back to the jetty against the current, with a strong, sure crawl-stroke. He waved at them.

Knee-deep in the Brandywine, Frodo felt cold mud wrinkling between his toes. The water lapping at his legs left a soft line of drifted cattail fuzz and bits of dead leaf against his skin. "Uncle Dinodas was wrong. I'll always come to see you, Pippin. And when you're a bit older, you and Merry will come to Hobbiton and stay with me as well."

The river swirled around his waist. Frodo sank into it, letting the water take his weight as it sluiced over his shoulders with a thrilling shock of cold. Pippin still clung about his neck.

"Merry said you left Buckland to live with Bilbo because your dad and your mummy died. It was a long time ago, wasn't it?"

"When I was about your age, Pip." Frodo turned to his back and lifted his feet. The current cupped his body like a hand, the rocking of the river immediately taking them further from the shore. Cicadas droned in the hot air of the afternoon.

Beside him Pippin's thin legs frog-kicked in the water. He scrambled up until he half-lay over Frodo's chest, as though his older cousin were a raft. His wild curls were wet and clinging to his forehead, and over the sunburnt tip of his nose a dusting of freckles spilled across his cheeks.

He pursed his lips, his eyes serious and considering. "Did you cry?"

Overhead the willow branches laced in a pattern against the glare of the sun. Willow leaves swirled around them, clung to Frodo's skin, wet and papery.

"Yes," he said. "A little."

Pippin nodded. He put his mouth close to Frodo's ear and whispered, "When Bob died last month, I cried. Not where Merry could see, though. And when I helped Merry and Tommy Burrows bury him, I didn't cry at all."

Bob was the kitchen-boy's yellow dog at Great Smials. Frodo lifted a hand, brushed the damp curls from his cousin's eyes. He said gravely, "That was very brave of you."

Pippin let go of Frodo's neck. Almost immediately he tumbled up and out of Frodo's arms, buoyed by the rushing of the river. Splashing away, he began to swim.

"I'm going to find the big fish, so you can see it too!" he called back over his shoulder. "You can tell where it's sleeping because there's _bubbles_ coming up out of the mud!" Somewhere farther away, Merry shouted.

Their voices, high and thin as the calls of birds, carried over the water as Frodo spread his arms and let his feet go still. He drew in a deep breath and then held it as the brown waters of the Brandywine lapped at his ears, then closed over his face.

The world went silent as he sank, open-eyed. Tendrils of his hair curled black around his face like water-weeds. He could hear his own heart, his blood tumbling through his veins in a thunder.

Frodo raised his hands towards the surface, towards the fractured blue of the sky through the water, a surface that seemed so close but was drifting farther and farther away. His arms were a pale blur before his eyes. What would it be like to watch the sun recede until it was nothing but a pinpoint of light, to sink into that darkness, into the push of the current, until his back struck the swirl of sand and reeds that made up the bottom? Already his lungs ached a little, his legs twitching with the urge to kick to the surface.

*It was a long time ago, wasn't it?*

They'd been carried into the front parlor of Brandy Hall. The stableboy had seen them go in the water, into the Brandywine; he'd been spooning on the riverbank under the beautiful silvery moon with Lila Mudruffin, the upstairs maid. He'd been the one to pull them to shore, and after they were brought in he'd stood on the mat in the hall, streaming mud and water, his face blank with shock. "She never tried to swim a stroke," he'd said dully, over and over. "She never even tried. And Master Drogo, he sank like any stone."

Frodo turned in the water, his legs kicking beneath him, a flash of white in the darkness. Below - ten feet? Twenty feet? - the long fronds of water-ferns waved on the bottom of the river, drifting closer and closer, a drowned garden.

"Poor Miss Primula," he'd heard the housekeeper whisper to the maids at Brandy Hall as they gathered up armfuls of flowers for the vases in the parlor. "Tetched, both of them," the stableman had growled, his voice flinty, as he'd draped the ponies in black to draw the hearse-wagon. "I blame the Took blood, myself," his Uncle Saradoc had said to his Aunt Esmeralda, and she had slapped his face and then burst into tears.

Frodo's lungs were wailing for air now, the fronds of the water-ferns tickling the soles of his feet. He felt a moment of blurring panic as he looked above him, high up through the darkness of the tobacco-brown water at the shrunken sun. Willow leaves and bits of earth tumbled past his face.

They'd been so white and so still, a long green waterweed wound in the golden buttons of his father's waistcoat. His mother's head lay on his father's breast, her eyes closed. He remembered that her face, the love-dimple in her chin and her little pointed nose, had still been beaded with water from the river. A heavy lock of her long dark hair was wrapped tight through his father's fingers. A faint smile had clung to her lips.

Frodo kicked hard, once, then twice. His heart was a burning weight in his chest, its heavy thuds echoing in his ears. In a rush the water around him lightened and warmed, the sun falling towards him out of the cracked blue-crystal of the sky. When he burst through to the surface he closed his eyes and drew a great, sobbing breath, turning his face to its heat. The world of light and noise and air echoed around him.

He could hear Merry's voice, and Pippin's, at the little fishing-dock ten yards away. Pippin had climbed up on it and knelt on the silvered wood. He was bent far over the water, his voice raised in childish shrieks of delight. In the river beneath him Merry, his sturdy body glistening, reached up and tugged at Pippin's arms as he laughed.

"You're comin' in, you are, my lad! And then I'll feed you to the big fish!"

Frodo blinked away the sting of water that didn't belong to the Brandywine.

*"And I heard she pushed him in, and he pulled her in after him..."*

* * *


End file.
